After the 13th century, Moscow became a cultural center. By the 18th century, the Tsardom of Russia had become the huge Russian Empire, stretching from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth eastward to the Pacific Ocean. Expansion in the western direction sharpened Russia's awareness of its separation from much of the rest of Europe and shattered the isolation in which the initial stages of expansion had occurred. Successive regimes of the 19th century responded to such pressures with a combination of halfhearted reform and repression. Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861, but its abolition was achieved on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to increase revolutionary pressures. Between the abolition of serfdom and the beginning of World War I in 1914, the Stolypin reforms, the constitution of 1906, and State Duma attempted to open and liberalize the economy and politics of Russia but the tsars were still not willing to relinquish autocratic rule or share their power.

The Russian Revolution in 1917 was triggered by a combination of economic breakdown, war-weariness, and discontent with the autocratic system of government, and it first brought a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists to power, but their failed policies led to seizure of power by the CommunistBolsheviks on 25 October. Between 1922 and 1991, the history of Russia is essentially the history of the Soviet Union, effectively an ideologically based state which was roughly conterminous with the Russian Empire before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The approach to the building of socialism, however, varied over different periods in Soviet history, from the mixed economy and diverse society and culture of the 1920s to the command economy and repressions of the Joseph Stalin era to the "era of stagnation" in the 1980s. From its first years, government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communists, as the Bolsheviks called themselves, beginning in March 1918. However, by the mid 1980s, with the weaknesses of its economic and political structures becoming acute, Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on major reforms, which led to the fall of the Soviet Union. The history of the Russian Federation officially starts in January 1992. The Russian Federation was the legal successor to the Soviet Union on the international stage. However, Russia has lost its superpower status after facing serious challenges in its efforts to forge a new post-Soviet political and economic system. Scrapping the socialist central planning and state ownership of property of the Soviet era, Russia attempted to build an economy based on market capitalism, often with painful results. Since the new millennium, Vladimir Putin has been its dominant leader. Even today Russia shares many continuities of political culture and social structure with its tsarist and Soviet past.

In 2006, 1.5-million-year-old Oldowan flint tools were discovered in the Dagestan Akusha region of the north Caucasus, demonstrating the presence of early humans in Russia from a very early time.[1] The discovery of some of the earliest evidence for the presence of anatomically modern humans found anywhere in Europe was reported in 2007 from the deepest levels of the Kostenki archaeological site near the Don River in Russia, which has been dated to at least 40,000 years ago.[2]Arctic Russia was reached by 40,000 years ago. That Russia was also home to some of the last surviving Neanderthals was revealed by the discovery of the partial skeleton of a Neanderthal infant in Mezmaiskaya cave in Adygea, which was carbon dated to only 29,000 years ago.[3] In 2008, Russian archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk, working at the site of Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, uncovered a 40,000 year old small bone fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile hominin, which DNA analysis revealed to be a previously unknown species of human, which was named the Denisova hominin.[4]

In the latter part of the 8th century BC, Greek merchants brought classical civilization to the trade emporiums in Tanais and Phanagoria.[9]Gelonus was described by Herodotos as a huge (Europe's biggest) earth- and wood-fortified grad inhabited around 500 BC by Heloni and Budini. At about the 2nd century AD Goths migrated to the Black Sea, and in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, a semi-legendary Gothic kingdom of Oium existed in Southern Russia until it was overrun by Huns. Between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD, the Bosporan Kingdom, a Hellenistic polity which succeeded the Greek colonies,[10] was also overwhelmed by successive waves of nomadic invasions,[11] led by warlike tribes which would often move on to Europe, as was the case with the Huns and Turkish Avars.

By the end of the 10th century, the Norse minority had merged with the Slavic population,[27] which also absorbed Greek Christian influences in the course of the multiple campaigns to loot Tsargrad, or Constantinople.[28] One such campaign claimed the life of the foremost Slavic druzhina leader, Svyatoslav I, who was renowned for having crushed the power of the Khazars on the Volga.[29] At the time, the Byzantine Empire was experiencing a major military and cultural revival; despite its later decline, its culture would have a continuous influence on the development of Russia in its formative centuries.

Kievan Rus' is important for its introduction of a Slavic variant of the Eastern Orthodox religion,[24] dramatically deepening a synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next thousand years. The region adopted Christianity in 988 by the official act of public baptism of Kiev inhabitants by Prince Vladimir I.[30] Some years later the first code of laws, Russkaya Pravda, was introduced.[31] From the onset the Kievan princes followed the Byzantine example and kept the Church dependent on them, even for its revenues,[32] so that the Russian Church and state were always closely linked.

By the 11th century, particularly during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, Kievan Rus' displayed an economy and achievements in architecture and literature superior to those that then existed in the western part of the continent.[33] Compared with the languages of European Christendom, the Russian language was little influenced by the Greek and Latin of early Christian writings.[24] This was because Church Slavonic was used directly in liturgy instead.[34]

A nomadic Turkic people, the Kipchaks (also known as the Cumans), replaced the earlier Pechenegs as the dominant force in the south steppe regions neighbouring to Rus' at the end of the 11th century and founded a nomadic state in the steppes along the Black Sea (Desht-e-Kipchak). Repelling their regular attacks, especially on Kiev, which was just one day's ride from the steppe, was a heavy burden for the southern areas of Rus'. The nomadic incursions caused a massive influx of Slavs to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north, particularly to the area known as Zalesye.

Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state because of in-fighting between members of the princely family that ruled it collectively. Kiev's dominance waned, to the benefit of Vladimir-Suzdal in the north-east, Novgorod in the north, and Halych-Volhynia in the south-west. Conquest by the MongolGolden Horde in the 13th century was the final blow. Kiev was destroyed.[35] Halych-Volhynia would eventually be absorbed into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth,[24] while the Mongol-dominated Vladimir-Suzdal and independent Novgorod Republic, two regions on the periphery of Kiev, would establish the basis for the modern Russian nation.[24]

The invading Mongols accelerated the fragmentation of the Rus'. In 1223, the disunited southern princes faced a Mongol raiding party at the Kalka River and were soundly defeated.[36] In 1237–1238 the Mongols burnt down the city of Vladimir (4 February 1238)[37] and other major cities of northeast Russia, routed the Russians at the Sit' River,[38] and then moved west into Poland and Hungary. By then they had conquered most of the Russian principalities.[39] Only the Novgorod Republic escaped occupation and continued to flourish in the orbit of the Hanseatic League.[40]

The impact of the Mongol invasion on the territories of Kievan Rus' was uneven. The advanced city culture was almost completely destroyed. As older centers such as Kiev and Vladimir never recovered from the devastation of the initial attack,[35] the new cities of Moscow,[41]Tver[41] and Nizhny Novgorod[42] began to compete for hegemony in the Mongol-dominated Russia. Although a Russian army defeated the Golden Horde at Kulikovo in 1380,[43]Mongol domination of the Russian-inhabited territories, along with demands of tribute from Russian princes, continued until about 1480.[41]

The Mongols held Russia and Volga Bulgaria in sway from their western capital at Sarai,[44] one of the largest cities of the medieval world. The princes of southern and eastern Russia had to pay tribute to the Mongols of the Golden Horde, commonly called Tatars;[44] but in return they received charters authorizing them to act as deputies to the khans. In general, the princes were allowed considerable freedom to rule as they wished,[44] while the Russian Orthodox Church even experienced a spiritual revival under the guidance of Metropolitan Alexis and Sergius of Radonezh.

To the Orthodox Church and most princes, the fanatical Northern Crusaders seemed a greater threat to the Russian way of life than the Mongols. In the mid-13th century, Alexander Nevsky, elected prince of Novgorod, acquired heroic status as the result of major victories over the Teutonic Knights and the Swedes. Alexander obtained Mongol protection and assistance in fighting invaders from the west who, hoping to profit from the Russian collapse since the Mongol invasions, tried to grab territory and convert the Russians to Roman Catholicism.[citation needed]

The Mongols left their impact on the Russians in such areas as military tactics and transportation. Under Mongol occupation, Russia also developed its postal road network, census, fiscal system, and military organization.[24] Eastern influence remained strong well until the 17th century, when Russian rulers made a conscious effort to modernize their country.[citation needed]

During the reign of Daniel, Moscow was little more than a small timber fort lost in the forests of Central Rus'

Daniil Aleksandrovich, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, founded the principality of Moscow (known as Muscovy in English),[41] which eventually expelled the Tatars from Russia. Well-situated in the central river system of Russia and surrounded by protective forests and marshes, Moscow was at first only a vassal of Vladimir, but soon it absorbed its parent state.

A major factor in the ascendancy of Moscow was the cooperation of its rulers with the Mongol overlords, who granted them the title of Grand Prince of Moscow and made them agents for collecting the Tatar tribute from the Russian principalities. The principality's prestige was further enhanced when it became the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its head, the Metropolitan, fled from Kiev to Vladimir in 1299 and a few years later established the permanent headquarters of the Church in Moscow under the original title of Kiev Metropolitan.

By the middle of the 14th century, the power of the Mongols was declining, and the Grand Princes felt able to openly oppose the Mongol yoke. In 1380, at Kulikovo on the Don River, the Mongols were defeated,[43] and although this hard-fought victory did not end Tatar rule of Russia, it did bring great fame to the Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy. Moscow's leadership in Russia was now firmly based and by the middle of the 14th century its territory had greatly expanded through purchase, war, and marriage.

In the 15th century, the grand princes of Moscow went on gathering Russian lands to increase the population and wealth under their rule. The most successful practitioner of this process was Ivan III[41] who laid the foundations for a Russian national state. Ivan competed with his powerful northwestern rival, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for control over some of the semi-independent Upper Principalities in the upper Dnieper and Oka River basins.[45][46]

Through the defections of some princes, border skirmishes, and a long war with the Novgorod Republic, Ivan III was able to annex Novgorod and Tver.[47] As a result, the Grand Duchy of Moscow tripled in size under his rule.[41] During his conflict with Pskov, a monk named Filofei (Philotheus of Pskov) composed a letter to Ivan III, with the prophecy that the latter's kingdom will be the Third Rome.[48] The Fall of Constantinople and the death of the last Greek Orthodox Christian emperor contributed to this new idea of Moscow as 'New Rome' and the seat of Orthodox Christianity.[41]

A contemporary of the Tudors and other "new monarchs" in Western Europe, Ivan proclaimed his absolute sovereignty over all Russian princes and nobles. Refusing further tribute to the Tatars, Ivan initiated a series of attacks that opened the way for the complete defeat of the declining Golden Horde, now divided into several Khanates and hordes. Ivan and his successors sought to protect the southern boundaries of their domain against attacks of the Crimean Tatars and other hordes.[49] To achieve this aim, they sponsored the construction of the Great Abatis Belt and granted manors to nobles, who were obliged to serve in the military. The manor system provided a basis for an emerging cavalry based army.

In this way, internal consolidation accompanied outward expansion of the state. By the 16th century, the rulers of Moscow considered the entire Russian territory their collective property. Various semi-independent princes still claimed specific territories,[46] but Ivan III forced the lesser princes to acknowledge the grand prince of Moscow and his descendants as unquestioned rulers with control over military, judicial, and foreign affairs. Gradually, the Russian ruler emerged as a powerful, autocratic ruler, a tsar. The first Russian ruler to officially crown himself "Tsar" was Ivan IV.[41]

Ivan III tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Golden Horde over the Rus, renovated the Moscow Kremlin, and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Biographer Fennell concludes that his reign was "militarily glorious and economically sound," and especially points to his territorial annexations and his centralized control over local rulers. However Fennell, the leading British specialist on Ivan III, argues that his reign was also "a period of cultural depression and spiritual barrenness. Freedom was stamped out within the Russian lands. By his bigoted anti-Catholicism Ivan brought down the curtain between Russia and the west. For the sake of territorial aggrandizement he deprived his country of the fruits of Western learning and civilization."[50]

The development of the Tsar's autocratic powers reached a peak during the reign (1547–1584) of Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible"). He strengthened the position of the monarch to an unprecedented degree, as he ruthlessly subordinated the nobles to his will, exiling or executing many on the slightest provocation.[41] Nevertheless, Ivan is often seen as a farsighted statesman who reformed Russia as he promulgated a new code of laws (Sudebnik of 1550),[51] established the first Russian feudal representative body (Zemsky Sobor), curbed the influence of clergy,[52] and introduced the local self-management in rural regions.[53]

Although his long Livonian War for the control of the Baltic coast and the access to sea trade ultimately proved a costly failure,[54] Ivan managed to annex the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia.[55] These conquests complicated the migration of the aggressive nomadic hordes from Asia to Europe through Volga and Ural. Through these conquests, Russia acquired a significant Muslim Tatar population and emerged as a multiethnic and multiconfessional state. Also around this period, the mercantile Stroganov family established a firm foothold at the Urals and recruited Russian Cossacks to colonise Siberia.[56]

In the later part of his reign, Ivan divided his realm in two. In the zone known as the oprichnina, Ivan's followers carried out a series of bloody purges of the feudal aristocracy (which he suspected of treachery after the betrayal of prince Kurbsky), culminating in the Massacre of Novgorod (1570). This combined with the military losses, epidemics, poor harvests so weakened Russia that the Crimean Tatars were able to sack central Russian regions and burn down Moscow (1571).[57] In 1572 Ivan abandoned the oprichnina.[58][59]

At the end of Ivan IV's reign the Polish–Lithuanian and Swedish armies carried out a powerful intervention in Russia, devastating its northern and northwest regions.[60]

The death of Ivan's childless son Feodor was followed by a period of civil wars and foreign intervention known as the "Time of Troubles" (1606–13).[41] Extremely cold summers (1601–1603) wrecked crops,[61] which led to the Russian famine of 1601–1603 and increased the social disorganization. Boris Godunov's (Борис Годунов) reign ended in chaos, civil war combined with foreign intrusion, devastation of many cities and depopulation of the rural regions. The country rocked by internal chaos also attracted several waves of interventions by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.[62]

The crisis provoked a patriotic national uprising against the invasion, both in 1611 and 1612. Finally, a volunteer army, led by the merchant Kuzma Minin and prince Dmitry Pozharsky, expelled the foreign forces from the capital on 4 November [O.S. 22 October] 1612.[68][69][70]

The Russian statehood survived the "Time of Troubles" and the rule of weak or corrupt Tsars because of the strength of the government's central bureaucracy. Government functionaries continued to serve, regardless of the ruler's legitimacy or the faction controlling the throne.[41] However, the "Time of Troubles" provoked by the dynastic crisis resulted in the loss of much territory to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Russo-Polish war, as well as to the Swedish Empire in the Ingrian War.

In February 1613, with the chaos ended and the Poles expelled from Moscow, a national assembly, composed of representatives from fifty cities and even some peasants, elected Michael Romanov, the young son of Patriarch Filaret, to the throne. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until 1917.

The immediate task of the new dynasty was to restore peace. Fortunately for Moscow, its major enemies, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, were engaged in a bitter conflict with each other, which provided Russia the opportunity to make peace with Sweden in 1617 and to sign a truce with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1619. Recovery of lost territories started in the mid-17th century, when the Khmelnitsky Uprising in Ukraine against Polish rule brought about the Treaty of Pereyaslav concluded between Russia and the Ukrainian Cossacks.

Rather than risk their estates in more civil war, the great nobles or boyars cooperated with the first Romanovs, enabling them to finish the work of bureaucratic centralization. Thus, the state required service from both the old and the new nobility, primarily in the military. In return the tsars allowed the boyars to complete the process of enserfing the peasants.

In the preceding century, the state had gradually curtailed peasants' rights to move from one landlord to another. With the state now fully sanctioning serfdom, runaway peasants became state fugitives, and the power of the landlords over the peasants "attached" to their land had become almost complete. Together the state and the nobles placed the overwhelming burden of taxation on the peasants, whose rate was 100 times greater in the mid-17th century than it had been a century earlier. In addition, middle-class urban tradesmen and craftsmen were assessed taxes, and, like the serfs, they were forbidden to change residence. All segments of the population were subject to military levy and to special taxes.[71]

Under such circumstances, peasant disorders[clarification needed] were endemic; even the citizens of Moscow revolted against the Romanovs during the Salt Riot (1648),[72]Copper Riot (1662),[72] and the Moscow Uprising (1682).[73] By far the greatest peasant uprising in 17th-century Europe erupted in 1667. As the free settlers of South Russia, the Cossacks, reacted against the growing centralization of the state, serfs escaped from their landlords and joined the rebels. The Cossack leader Stenka Razin led his followers up the Volga River, inciting peasant uprisings and replacing local governments with Cossack rule.[41] The tsar's army finally crushed his forces in 1670; a year later Stenka was captured and beheaded. Yet, less than half a century later, the strains of military expeditions produced another revolt in Astrakhan, ultimately subdued.

Peter the Great (1672–1725) brought autocracy into Russia and played a major role in bringing his country into the European state system.[74] Russia had now become the largest country in the world, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of the land was unoccupied, and travel was slow. Much of its expansion had taken place in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian settlement of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the reconquest of Kiev, and the pacification of the Siberian tribes. However, this vast land had a population of only 14 million. With a short growing season grain yields trailed behind those in the West; potatoes were not yet widespread. The great majority were tied to agriculture. Russia remained isolated from the sea trade, its internal trade communications and many manufactures were dependent on the seasonal changes.[75]

Russian expansion in Eurasia between 1533–1896

Peter's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks. His aim was to establish a Russian foothold on the Black Sea by taking the town of Azov.[76] His attention then turned to the north. Peter still lacked a secure northern seaport except at Archangel on the White Sea, whose harbor was frozen nine months a year. Access to the Baltic was blocked by Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on three sides. Peter's ambitions for a "window to the sea" led him in 1699 to make a secret alliance with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark against Sweden resulting in the Great Northern War.

The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden sued for peace with Russia. Peter acquired four provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, thus securing his coveted access to the sea. There, in 1703, he had already founded the city that was to become Russia's new capital, Saint Petersburg, as a "window opened upon Europe" to replace Moscow, long Russia's cultural center. Russian intervention in the Commonwealth marked, with the Silent Sejm, the beginning of a 200-year domination of that region by the Russian Empire. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title of emperor as well as tsar, and Russian Tsardom officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.

Peter reorganized his government on the latest Western models, molding Russia into an absolutist state. He replaced the old boyarDuma (council of nobles) with a nine-member senate, in effect a supreme council of state. The countryside was also divided into new provinces and districts. Peter told the senate that its mission was to collect tax revenues. In turn tax revenues tripled over the course of his reign.

Administrative Collegia were established in St. Petersburg, to replace the old governmental departments. In 1722 Peter promulgated his famous Table of ranks. As part of the government reform, the Orthodox Church was partially incorporated into the country's administrative structure, in effect making it a tool of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a collective body, the Holy Synod, led by a lay government official. Peter continued and intensified his predecessors' requirement of state service for all nobles.

By this same time, the once powerful Persian Safavid Empire to its south was heavily declining. Making advantage of the profitable situation, Peter launched the Russo-Persian War (1722-1723) otherwise known as "The Persian Expedition of Peter the Great" by the Russian histographers, in order to be the first Russian emperor to increase Russian influence in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea. After considerable successes and the capture of many provinces and cities in the Caucasus and northern Persia, the Safavids were forced to hand over the territories to Russia. However, 9 years later all territories would be ceded back to Persia, now led by the charismatic and military genius Nader Shah, as part of the Treaty of Resht and the Russo-Persian alliance against the Ottoman Empire.[77]

Russia, by the end of Peter's reign, had become a great power. Peter the Great died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession.

Peter I was succeeded by his second wife (Catherine I, 1725–1727) who was merely a figurehead for a powerful group of high officials, then by his minor grandson (Peter II, 1727–1730), then by his niece, Anna, daughter of Tsar Ivan V. In 1741 Elizabeth, daughter of Peter, seized the throne, assisted by the Preobrazhensky Regiment. She reigned for twenty years, a period marked by the establishment of Moscow University and the abolition of capital punishment, except in cases of high treason.

Nearly forty years were to pass before a comparably ambitious ruler appeared on the Russian throne. Catherine II, the Great, was a German princess who married the German heir to the Russian crown. Finding him incompetent, Catherine tacitly consented to his murder and in 1762 she became ruler.[78]

Catherine patronized arts, science and learning. She contributed to the resurgence of the Russian nobility that began after the death of Peter the Great. Catherine promulgated Charter to the Gentry reaffirming rights and freedoms of the Russian nobility, and abolishing mandatory state service.

Catherine the Great extended Russian political control over the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth with actions including the support of the Targowica Confederation, although the cost of her campaigns, on top of the oppressive social system that required lords' serfs to spend almost all of their time laboring on the lords' land, provoked a major peasant uprising in 1773, after Catherine legalized the selling of serfs separate from land. Inspired by another Cossack named Pugachev, with the emphatic cry of "Hang all the landlords!" the rebels threatened to take Moscow before they were ruthlessly suppressed. Catherine had Pugachev drawn and quartered in Red Square,[79] but the specter of revolution continued to haunt her and her successors.

Catherine successfully waged war against the decaying Ottoman Empire[80] and advanced Russia's southern boundary to the Black Sea. Then, by allying with the rulers of Austria and Prussia, she incorporated the territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where after a century of Russian rule non-Catholic mainly Orthodox population prevailed[81] during the Partitions of Poland, pushing the Russian frontier westward into Central Europe. In accordance to the treaty Russia had signed with the Georgians to protect them against any new invasion of their Persian suzerains and further political aspirations, Catherine waged a new war against Persia in 1796 after they had again invaded Georgia and established rule over it about a year prior and expelled the newly established Russian garrisons in the Caucasus.

By the time of her death in 1796, Catherine's expansionist policy had made Russia into a major European power. This continued with Alexander I's wresting of Finland from the weakened kingdom of Sweden in 1809 and of Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812.

After the Russian armies liberated allied Georgia from Persian occupation in 1802, they clashed with Persia over control and consolidation over Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Dagestan, and also got involved in the Caucasian War against the Caucasian Imamate. To the south west, Russia attempted to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, using Georgia at its base for the Caucasus and Anatolian front. Late 1820's were successful military years. In the 1828-29 Russo-Turkish War Russia invaded northeastern Anatolia and occupied the strategic Ottoman towns of Erzurum and Gumushane and, posing as protector and saviour of the Greek Orthodox population, received extensive support from the region's Pontic Greeks. Following a brief occupation, the Russian imperial army withdrew back into Georgia.

He and Napoleon could never agree, especially about Poland, and the alliance collapsed by 1810.

Furthermore Russia's economy had been hurt by Napoleon's Continental System, which cut off trade with Britain. As Esdaile notes, "Implicit in the idea of a Russian Poland was, of course, a war against Napoleon."[82] Schroeder says Poland was the root cause of the conflict but Russia's refusal to support the Continental System was also a factor.[83]

The invasion of Russia was a catastrophe for Napoleon and his 450,000 invasion troops. One major battle was fought at Borodino; casualties were very high but it was indecisive and Napoleon was unable to engage and defeat the Russian armies. He attempted to force the Tsar to terms by capturing Moscow at the onset of winter, even though the French Army had already lost most of its men. The expectation proved futile. The Russians retreated, burning crops and food supplies in a scorched earth policy that multiplied Napoleon's logistic problems. Unprepared for winter warfare, 85%-90% of Napoleon's soldiers died from disease, cold, starvation or by ambush by peasant guerrilla fighters. As Napoleon's forces retreated, Russian troops pursued them into Central and Western Europe and finally captured Paris.[84][85] Out of a total population of around 43 million people,[86] Russia lost about 1.5 million in the year 1812; of these about 250,000 to 300,000 were soldiers and the rest peasants and serfs.[87]

After the total of Napoleon in 1815, Alexander became known as the 'savior of Europe.' He presided over the redrawing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), which made him the king of Congress Poland. He formed the Holy Alliance with Austria and Prussia, to suppress revolutionary movements in Europe that he saw as immoral threats to legitimate Christian monarchs. He helped Austria's Klemens von Metternich in suppressing all national and liberal movements.

Although the Russian Empire would play a leading political role as late as 1848, its retention of serfdom precluded economic progress of any significant degree. As West European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, sea trade and colonialism which had begun in the second half of the 18th century, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, undermining its ability to field strong armies.

Russia's great power status obscured the inefficiency of its government, the isolation of its people, and its economic backwardness.[88] Following the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I was willing to discuss constitutional reforms, and though a few were introduced, no thoroughgoing changes were attempted.[89]

The tsar was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I (1825–1855), who at the onset of his reign was confronted with an uprising. The background of this revolt lay in the Napoleonic Wars, when a number of well-educated Russian officers traveled in Europe in the course of the military campaigns, where their exposure to the liberalism of Western Europe encouraged them to seek change on their return to autocratic Russia. The result was the Decembrist Revolt (December 1825), the work of a small circle of liberal nobles and army officers who wanted to install Nicholas' brother as a constitutional monarch. But the revolt was easily crushed, leading Nicholas to turn away from the Westernization program begun by Peter the Great and champion the doctrine "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality".[90]

Tsar Nicholas I (reigned 1825–1855) lavished attention on his very large army; with a population of 60-70 million people, the army included a million men. They had outdated equipment and tactics, but the tsar, who dressed like a soldier and surrounded himself with officers, gloried in the victory over Napoleon in 1812 and took enormous pride in its smartness on parade. The cavalry horses, for example, were only trained in parade formations, and did poorly in battle. The glitter and braid masked profound weaknesses that he did not see. He put generals in charge of most of his civilian agencies regardless of their qualifications. An agnostic who won fame in cavalry charges was made supervisor of Church affairs. The Army became the vehicle of upward social mobility for noble youths from non-Russian areas, such as Poland, the Baltic, Finland and Georgia. On the other hand, many miscreants, petty criminals and undesirables were punished by local officials by enlisting them for life in the Army. The conscription system was highly unpopular with people, as was the practice of forcing peasants to house the soldiers for six months of the year. Curtiss finds that "The pedantry of Nicholas' military system, which stressed unthinking obedience and parade ground evolutions rather than combat training, produced ineffective commanders in time of war." His commanders in the Crimean War were old and incompetent, and indeed so were his muskets as the colonels sold the best equipment and the best food.[93]

Finally the Crimean war at the end of his reign demonstrated to the world what no one had previously realized: Russia was militarily weak, technologically backward, and administratively incompetent. Despite his grand ambitions toward the south and Turkey, Russia had not built its railroad network in that direction, and communications were bad. The bureaucracy was riddled with graft, corruption and inefficiency and was unprepared for war. The Navy was weak and technologically backward; the Army, although very large, was good only for parades, suffered from colonels who pocketed their men's pay, poor morale, and was even more out of touch with the latest technology as developed by Britain and France. As Fuller notes, "Russia had been beaten on the Crimean peninsula, and the military feared that it would inevitably be beaten again unless steps were taken to surmount its military weakness."[94][95][96]

As Western Europe modernized after 1840 the issue became one of Russian direction. Some favored imitating Europe while others renounced the West and called for a return of the traditions of the past. The latter path was championed by Slavophiles, who heaped scorn on the "decadent" West. The Slavophiles were opponents of bureaucracy, preferred the collectivism of the medieval Russian mir, or village community, to the individualism of the West.[97]

Since the war against Napoleon, Russia had become deeply involved in the affairs of Europe, as part of the "Holy Alliance." The Holy Alliance was formed to serve as the "policeman of Europe." However, to be the policeman of Europe and maintain the Holy alliance needed large armies. Prussia, Austria, Britain and France, (the other members of the "Holy Alliance") lacked the large armies required to do so. They needed Russia to supply the required armies. Their need for large armies fit the philosophy of Tsar Nicholas I. When the Revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, Russia was quiet. The Tsar sent his army into Hungary in 1849 at the request of the Austrian Empire and broke the revolt, while preventing its spread to Russian Poland. Indeed the Tsar cracked down on any signs of unrest.[98]

Russia expected that in exchange for supplying the troops to be the policeman of Europe, it should have a free hand in dealing with the decaying Ottoman Empire—the "sick man of Europe." The upshot was that Russia invaded the Crimea peninsula and other regions, leading to the Crimean War of 1853-56 when Britain and France came to the rescue of the Ottomans.[99][100] As Fuller notes, "Russia had been beaten on the Crimean peninsula, and the military feared that it would inevitably be beaten again unless steps were taken to surmount its military weakness."[101]

In this setting Michael Bakunin would emerge as the father of anarchism. He left Russia in 1842 to Western Europe, where he became active in the socialist movement. After participating in the May Uprising in Dresden of 1849, he was handed over to Russia and sent to Siberia, He escaped in 1861, then began to organize. He argued with Karl Marx over socialism. Marx won and had Bakunin and the anarchists Bakunin expelled from the First International in 1872. He died in obscurity but other anarchists took up the torch, especially Russian radicals as Alexander Herzen and Peter Kropotkin.[102]

Tsar Nicholas died with his philosophy in dispute. One year earlier, Russia had become involved in the Crimean War, a conflict fought primarily in the Crimean peninsula.[103] Since playing a major role in the defeat of Napoleon, Russia had been regarded as militarily invincible, but, once pitted against a coalition of the great powers of Europe, the reverses it suffered on land and sea exposed the weakness of Tsar Nicholas' regime.

When Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, desire for reform was widespread. The most pressing problem which confronted the Government was that of serfdom. In 1859, there were 23 million serfs (total population of Russia 67.1 Million).[104] Alexander II made up his own mind to abolish serfdom from above rather than wait for it to be abolished from below through revolution. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was the single most important event in 19th-century Russian history. It was the beginning of the end for the landed aristocracy's monopoly of power.[citation needed] Emancipation brought a supply of free labor to the cities, industry was stimulated, and the middle class grew in number and influence. The freed peasants had to buy land, allotted to them, from the landowners with the state assistance. The Government issued special bonds to the landowners for the land that they had lost, and collected a special tax from the peasants, called redemption payments, at a rate of 5% of the total cost of allotted land yearly. All the land turned over to the peasants was owned collectively by the mir, the village community, which divided the land among the peasants and supervised the various holdings.

Alexander was the most successful Russian reformer since Peter the Great, and was responsible for numerous reforms besides abolishing serfdom. He reorganized the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing capital punishment, promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing universal military service, ending some of the privileges of the nobility, and promoting the universities. In foreign policy, he sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, fearing the remote colony would fall into British hands if there was another war. He modernized the military command system. He sought peace, and moved away from bellicose France when Napoleon III fell. He joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation. The Russian Empire expanded in Siberia and in the Caucasus and made gains at the expense of China. Faced with an uprising in Poland in 1863, he stripped that land of its separate Constitution and incorporated it directly into Russia. To counter the rise of a revolutionary and anarchistic movements, he sent thousands of dissidents into exile in Siberia and was proposing additional parliamentary reforms when he was assassinated in 1881.[105]

In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the Balkans. The Russo-Turkish War was popular among Russian people, who supported the independence of their fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs and the Bulgarians. However, the war increased tension with Austria-Hungary, which also had ambitions in the region. The tsar was disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, but abided by that agreement.[106] During this period Russia expanded its empire into Central Asia, which was rich in raw materials, conquering the khanates of Kokand, Bokhara and Khiva, as well as the Trans-Caspian region.[107]

In the 1860s a movement known as Nihilism developed in Russia. A term originally coined by Ivan Turgenev in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, Nihilists favoured the destruction of human institutions and laws, based on the assumption that such institutions and laws are artificial and corrupt. At its core, Russian nihilism was characterized by the belief that the world lacks comprehensible meaning, objective truth, or value. For some time many Russian liberals had been dissatisfied by what they regarded as the empty discussions of the intelligentsia. The Nihilists questioned all old values and shocked the Russian establishment.[108] They moved beyond being purely philosophical to becoming major political forces after becoming involved in the cause of reform. Their path was facilitated by the previous actions of the Decembrists, who revolted in 1825, and the financial and political hardship caused by the Crimean War, which caused large numbers of Russian people to lose faith in political institutions.[citation needed]

The Nihilists first attempted to convert the aristocracy to the cause of reform.[citation needed] Failing there, they turned to the peasants. Their campaign, which targeted the people instead of the aristocracy or the landed gentry, became known as the Populist movement. It was based upon the belief that the common people possessed the wisdom and peaceful ability to lead the nation.[109]

While the Narodnik movement was gaining momentum, the government quickly moved to extirpate it. In response to the growing reaction of the government, a radical branch of the Narodniks advocated and practiced terrorism.[109] One after another, prominent officials were shot or killed by bombs. This represented the ascendancy of anarchism in Russia as a powerful revolutionary force. Finally, after several attempts, Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, on the very day he had approved a proposal to call a representative assembly to consider new reforms in addition to the abolition of serfdom designed to ameliorate revolutionary demands.[citation needed]

Unlike his father, the new tsar Alexander III (1881–1894) was throughout his reign a staunch reactionary who revived the maxim of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Character".[110] A committed Slavophile, Alexander III believed that Russia could be saved from chaos only by shutting itself off from the subversive influences of Western Europe. In his reign Russia concluded the union with republican France to contain the growing power of Germany, completed the conquest of Central Asia, and exacted important territorial and commercial concessions from China.

The tsar's most influential adviser was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor to Alexander III and his son Nicholas, and procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1895. He taught his royal pupils to fear freedom of speech and press and to hate democracy, constitutions, and the parliamentary system.[111] Under Pobedonostsev, revolutionaries were hunted down[112] and a policy of Russification was carried out throughout the empire.[113]

Ethnic and religious map of European Russia at the end of the 19th century. This imperial-era map shows Russians (“Great Russians”), Belarusians (“White Russians”), and Ukrainians (“Little Russians”) in a single colour; based on 1897 Russian census.

Alexander was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894–1917). The Industrial Revolution, which began to exert a significant influence in Russia, was meanwhile creating forces that would finally overthrow the tsar. Politically, these opposition forces organized into three competing parties: The liberal elements among the industrial capitalists and nobility, who believed in peaceful social reform and a constitutional monarchy, founded the Constitutional Democratic party or Kadets in 1905. Followers of the Narodnik tradition established the Socialist-Revolutionary Party or Esers in 1901, advocating the distribution of land among those who actually worked it—the peasants. A third and more radical group founded the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP in 1898; this party was the primary exponent of Marxism in Russia. Gathering their support from the radical intellectuals and the urban working class, they advocated complete social, economic and political revolution.[114]

In 1903 the RSDLP split into two wings: the radical Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and the relatively moderate Mensheviks, led by Yuli Martov. The Mensheviks believed that Russian socialism would grow gradually and peacefully and that the tsar’s regime should be succeeded by a democratic republic in which the socialists would cooperate with the liberal bourgeois parties. The Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, advocated the formation of a small elite of professional revolutionists, subject to strong party discipline, to act as the vanguard of the proletariat in order to seize power by force.[115]

The disastrous performance of the Russian armed forces in the Russo-Japanese War was a major blow to the Russian State and increased the potential for unrest.[116]

In January 1905, an incident known as "Bloody Sunday" occurred when Father Gapon led an enormous crowd to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to present a petition to the tsar. When the procession reached the palace, Cossacks opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds.[116] The Russian masses were so aroused over the massacre that a general strike was declared demanding a democratic republic. This marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Soviets (councils of workers) appeared in most cities to direct revolutionary activity.[117]

In October 1905, Nicholas reluctantly issued the famous October Manifesto, which conceded the creation of a national Duma (legislature) to be called without delay.[116] The right to vote was extended, and no law was to go into force without confirmation by the Duma. The moderate groups were satisfied;[116] but the socialists rejected the concessions as insufficient and tried to organize new strikes. By the end of 1905, there was disunity among the reformers, and the tsar's position was strengthened for the time being.[118]

Vladimir Lenin speaking to Red Army troops before their departure to the Polish front (the left half of the original picture)[119]

Bound by treaty, Tsar Nicholas II entered World War I to defend Serbia from Austria. At the opening of hostilities in August 1914, the Russians took the offensive against both Germany and Austria-Hungary.[120]

The very large but poorly equipped Russian army fought tenaciously and desperately at times despite its lack of organization and very weak logistics. Casualties were enormous. By 1915, many soldiers were sent to the front unarmed, and told to pick up whatever weapons they could from the battlefield. Nevertheless the Russian army fought on, and tied down large numbers of Germans and Austrians. When civilians showed a surge of patriotism, the tsar and his entourage failed to exploit it for military benefit. Instead, they relied on slow-moving bureaucracies. In areas where they did advance against the Austrians, they failed to rally the ethnic and religious minorities that were hostile to Austria, such as Poles. The tsar refused to cooperate with the national legislature, the Duma, and listened less to experts than to his wife, who was in thrall to her chief advisor, the ignorant hypnotic peasant Grigori Rasputin.[121]

Repeated military failures and bureaucratic ineptitude soon turned large segments of the population against the government.[116] The German and Ottoman fleets prevented Russia from importing supplies and exporting goods through the Baltic and Black seas.[116]

By the middle of 1915 the impact of the war was demoralizing. Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties kept occurring, and inflation was mounting. Strikes increased among low-paid factory workers, and the peasants, who wanted land reforms, were restless.[122] Meanwhile, elite distrust of the regime was deepened by reports that Rasputin was gaining influence; his assassination in late 1916 ended the scandal but did not restore the autocracy's lost prestige.[116]

The Tsarist system was completely overthrown in February 1917. Rabinowitch argues:

The February 1917 revolution...grew out of prewar political and economic instability, technological backwardness, and fundamental social divisions, coupled with gross mismanagement of the war effort, continuing military defeats, domestic economic dislocation, and outrageous scandals surrounding the monarchy.[123]

In late February (3 March 1917), a strike occurred in a factory in the capital Petrograd (the new name for Saint Petersburg). On 23 February (8 March) 1917, thousands of women textile workers walked out of their factories protesting the lack of food and calling on other workers to join them. Within days, nearly all the workers in the city were idle, and street fighting broke out. The tsar ordered the Duma to disband, ordered strikers to return to work, and ordered troops to shoot at demonstrators in the streets. His orders triggered the February Revolution, especially when soldiers openly sided with the strikers. The tsar and the aristocracy fell on 2 March, as Nicholas II abdicated.[124][125]

To fill the vacuum of authority, the Duma declared a Provisional Government, headed by Prince Lvov which was collectively known as the Russian Republic.[126] Meanwhile, the socialists in Petrograd organized elections among workers and soldiers to form a soviet (council) of workers' and soldiers' deputies, as an organ of popular power that could pressure the "bourgeois" Provisional Government.[126]

In July, following a series of crises that undermined their authority with the public, the head of the Provisional Government resigned and was succeeded by Alexander Kerensky, who was more progressive than his predecessor but not radical enough for the Bolsheviks or many Russians discontented with the deepening economic crisis and the continuation of the war. While Kerensky's government marked time, the socialist-led soviet in Petrograd joined with soviets that formed throughout the country to create a national movement.[127]

Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland with the help of Germany, which hoped that widespread strife would cause Russia to withdraw from the war. After many behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the soviets seized control of the government in November 1917 and drove Kerensky and his moderate provisional government into exile, in the events that would become known as the October Revolution.[128]

When the national Constituent Assembly (elected in December 1917) refused to become a rubber stamp of the Bolsheviks, it was dissolved by Lenin's troops and all vestiges of democracy were removed. With the handicap of the moderate opposition removed, Lenin was able to free his regime from the war problem by the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) with Germany Russia lost much of her western borderlands. However when Germany was defeated the Soviet government repudiated the Treaty.[129]

The Bolshevik grip on power was by no means secure, and a lengthy struggle broke out between the new regime and its opponents, which included the Socialist Revolutionaries, right-wing "Whites", and large numbers of peasants. At the same time the Allied powers sent several expeditionary armies to support the anti-Communist forces in an attempt to force Russia to rejoin the world war. The Bolsheviks fought against both these forces and national independence movements in the former Russian Empire. By 1921, they had defeated their internal enemies and brought most of the newly independent states under their control, with the exception of Finland, the Baltic States, the Moldavian Democratic Republic (which joined Romania), and Poland (with whom they had fought the Polish-Soviet War).[130] Finland also annexed the region Pechenga of the Russian Kola peninsula; Soviet Russia and allied Soviet republics conceded the parts of its territory to Estonia (Petseri County and Estonian Ingria), Latvia (Pytalovo), and Turkey (Kars). Poland incorporated the contested territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, the former parts of the Russian Empire (except Galicia) east to Curzon Line.[131]

The constitution, adopted in 1924, established a federal system of government based on a succession of soviets set up in villages, factories, and cities in larger regions. This pyramid of soviets in each constituent republic culminated in the All-Union Congress of Soviets. However, while it appeared that the congress exercised sovereign power, this body was actually governed by the Communist Party, which in turn was controlled by the Politburo from Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, just as it had been under the tsars before Peter the Great.

The period from the consolidation of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until 1921 is known as the period of war communism.[134] Land, all industry, and small businesses were nationalized, and the money economy was restricted. Strong opposition soon developed.[134] The peasants wanted cash payments for their products and resented having to surrender their surplus grain to the government as a part of its civil war policies. Confronted with peasant opposition, Lenin began a strategic retreat from war communism known as the New Economic Policy (NEP).[134] The peasants were freed from wholesale levies of grain and allowed to sell their surplus produce in the open market. Commerce was stimulated by permitting private retail trading. The state continued to be responsible for banking, transportation, heavy industry, and public utilities.

Although the left opposition among the Communists criticized the rich peasants, or kulaks, who benefited from the NEP, the program proved highly beneficial and the economy revived.[134] The NEP would later come under increasing opposition from within the party following Lenin's death in early 1924.[134]

The 1932 Soviet poster symbolizing the reform of "old ways of life" is dedicated to liberation of women from traditional role of the oppressed housekeeper. The text reads, "8 March is the day of the rebellion of the working women against the kitchen slavery." "Say NO to the oppression and Babbittry of the household work!"

While the Russian economy was being transformed, the social life of the people underwent equally drastic changes. From the beginning of the revolution, the government attempted to weaken patriarchal domination of the family.[citation needed]Divorce no longer required court procedure,[135] and to make women completely free of the responsibilities of childbearing, abortion was made legal as early as 1920.[136] As a side effect, the emancipation of women increased the labor market. Girls were encouraged to secure an education and pursue a career in the factory or the office. Communal nurseries were set up for the care of small children, and efforts were made to shift the center of people's social life from the home to educational and recreational groups, the soviet clubs.

In accordance with Marxist theory, the government also promoted atheism and materialism. It opposed organized religion, especially to break the power of the Russian Orthodox Church, a former pillar of the old tsarist regime and a major barrier to social change.[citation needed] Many religious leaders were sent to internal exile camps.[citation needed] Members of the party were forbidden to attend religious services, and the education system was separated from the Church.[citation needed] Religious teaching was prohibited except in the home, and atheist instruction was stressed in the schools.

The years from 1929 to 1939 comprised a tumultuous decade in Soviet history—a period of massive industrialization and internal struggles as Joseph Stalin established near total control over Soviet society, wielding virtually unrestrained power. Following Lenin's death Stalin wrestled to gain control of the Soviet Union with rival factions in the Politburo, especially Leon Trotsky's. By 1928, with the Trotskyists either exiled or rendered powerless, Stalin was ready to put a radical programme of industrialisation into action.[137]

As a part of the plan, the government took control of agriculture through the state and collective farms (kolkhozes).[138] By a decree of February 1930, about one million individual peasants (kulaks) were forced off their land. Many peasants strongly opposed regimentation by the state, often slaughtering their herds when faced with the loss of their land. In some sections they revolted, and countless peasants deemed "kulaks" by the authorities were executed.[139] The combination of bad weather, deficiencies of the hastily established collective farms, and massive confiscation of grain precipitated a serious famine,[138] and several million peasants died of starvation, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and parts of southwestern Russia.[138] The deteriorating conditions in the countryside drove millions of desperate peasants to the rapidly growing cities, fueling industrialization, and vastly increasing Russia's urban population in the space of just a few years.

The plans received remarkable results in areas aside from agriculture. Russia, in many measures the poorest nation in Europe at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far surpassing Germany's pace of industrialization in the 19th century and Japan's earlier in the 20th century.[citation needed]

While the Five-Year Plans were forging ahead, Stalin was establishing his personal power. The NKVD gathered in tens of thousands of Soviet citizens to face arrest, deportation, or execution. Of the six original members of the 1920 Politburo who survived Lenin, all were purged by Stalin. Old Bolsheviks who had been loyal comrades of Lenin, high officers in the Red Army, and directors of industry were liquidated in the Great Purges.[140] Purges in other Soviet republics also helped centralize control in the USSR.

Stalin's repressions led to the creation of a vast system of internal exile, of considerably greater dimensions than those set up in the past by the tsars.[141][not in citation given] Draconian penalties were introduced and many citizens were prosecuted for fictitious crimes of sabotage and espionage. The labor provided by convicts working in the labor camps of the Gulag system became an important component of the industrialization effort, especially in Siberia.[142][143] An estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag system, and perhaps another 15 million had experience of some other form of forced labor.[144][145]

In 1938 Germany annexed Austria and, together with major Western European powers, signed the Munich Agreement following which Germany, Hungary and Poland divided parts of Czechoslovakia between themselves. German plans for further eastward expansion, as well as the lack of resolve from Western powers to oppose it, became more apparent. Despite the Soviet Union strongly opposing the Munich deal and repeatedly reaffirming its readiness to militarily back commitments given earlier to Czechoslovakia, the Western Betrayal led to the end of Czechoslovakia and further increased fears in the Soviet Union of a coming German attack. This led the Soviet Union to rush the modernization of its military industry and to carry out its own diplomatic maneuvers. In 1939 the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany dividing Eastern Europe into two separate spheres of influence.[151] Following the pact, the USSR normalized relations with Nazi Germany and resumed Soviet-German trade.[152]

Although the Soviet Union was victorious in World War II, the war resulted in around 26–27 million Soviet deaths (estimates vary)[170] and had devastated the Soviet economy in the struggle. Some 1,710 towns and 70 thousand settlements were destroyed.[171] The occupied territories suffered from the ravages of German occupation and deportations of slave labor in Germany.[172] Thirteen million Soviet citizens became victims of a repressive policy of Germans and their allies on an occupied territory, where people died because of mass murders, famine, absence of elementary medical aid and slave labor.[173][174][175][176] The NaziGenocide of the Jews carried by German Einsatzgruppen, along the local collaborators resulted in almost complete annihilation of the Jewish population over the entire territory temporary occupied by Germany and its allies.,[177][178][4], [5]. During occupation, Russia's Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, region lost around a quarter of its population.[176] Soviet Belarus lost from a quarter to a third of its population. 3.6 million Soviet prisoners of war (of 5.5 million) died in German camps.[179][180][181]

Collaboration among the major Allies had won the war and was supposed to serve as the basis for postwar reconstruction and security. However, the conflict between Soviet and U.S. national interests, known as the Cold War, came to dominate the international stage in the postwar period.

The Cold War emerged from a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945.[182] Russia had suffered three devastating Western onslaughts in the previous 150 years during the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, and the Second World War, and Stalin's goal was to establish a buffer zone of states between Germany and the Soviet Union.[183] Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the Yalta agreement.[citation needed] With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, Stalin was also biding his time, as his own atomic bomb project was steadily and secretly progressing.[184][185]

In April 1949 the United States sponsored the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact in which most Western nations pledged to treat an armed attack against one nation as an assault on all. The Soviet Union established an Eastern counterpart to NATO in 1955, dubbed the Warsaw Pact.[186][187][188] The division of Europe into Western and Soviet blocks later took on a more global character, especially after 1949, when the U.S. nuclear monopoly ended with the testing of a Soviet bomb and the Communist takeover in China.

As the Soviet Union continued to maintain tight control over its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Cold War gave way to Détente and a more complicated pattern of international relations in the 1970s in which the world was no longer clearly split into two clearly opposed blocs. Less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence, and the two superpowers were partially able to recognize their common interest in trying to check the further spread and proliferation of nuclear weapons in treaties such as SALT I, SALT II, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. After the rapid succession of former KGB Chief Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, transitional figures with deep roots in Brezhnevite tradition, Mikhail Gorbachev announced perestroika in an attempt to modernize Soviet communism, and made significant changes in the party leadership.[citation needed] However, Gorbachev's social reforms led to unintended consequences. Because of his policy of glasnost, which facilitated public access to information after decades of government repression, social problems received wider public attention, undermining the Communist Party's authority. In the revolutions of 1989 the USSR lost its allies in Eastern Europe. Glasnost allowed ethnic and nationalist disaffection to reach the surface.[citation needed] Many constituent republics, especially the Baltic republics, Georgian SSR and Moldavian SSR, sought greater autonomy, which Moscow was unwilling to provide. Gorbachev's attempts at economic reform were not sufficient, and the Soviet government left intact most of the fundamental elements of communist economy. Suffering from low pricing of petroleum and natural gas, ongoing war in Afghanistan, outdated industry and pervasive corruption, the Soviet planned economy proved to be ineffective, and by 1990 the Soviet government had lost control over economic conditions. Due to price control, there were shortages of almost all products, reaching their peak in the end of 1991, when people had to stand in long lines and to be lucky enough to buy even the essentials. Control over the constituent republics was also relaxed, and they began to assert their national sovereignty over Moscow.

The tension between Soviet Union and Russian SFSR authorities came to be personified in the bitter power struggle between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.[196] Squeezed out of Union politics by Gorbachev in 1987, Yeltsin, who represented himself as a committed democrat, presented a significant opposition to Gorbachev authority.[citation needed] In a remarkable reversal of fortunes, he gained election as chairman of the Russian republic's new Supreme Soviet in May 1990.[197] The following month, he secured legislation giving Russian laws priority over Soviet laws and withholding two-thirds of the budget.[citation needed] In the first Russian presidential election in 1991 Yeltsin became president of the Russian SFSR. At last Gorbachev attempted to restructure the Soviet Union into a less centralized state. However, on 19 August 1991, a coup against Gorbachev, conspired by senior Soviet officials, was attempted. The coup faced wide popular opposition and collapsed in three days, but disintegration of the Union became imminent. The Russian government took over most of the Soviet Union government institutions on its territory. Because of the dominant position of Russians in the Soviet Union, most gave little thought to any distinction between Russia and the Soviet Union before the late 1980s. In the Soviet Union, only Russian SFSR lacked even the paltry instruments of statehood that the other republics possessed, such as its own republic-level Communist Party branch, trade union councils, Academy of Sciences, and the like.[198] The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was banned in Russia in 1991–1992, although no lustration has ever taken place, and many of its members became top Russian officials. However, as the Soviet government was still opposed to market reforms, the economic situation continued to deteriorate. By December 1991, the shortages had resulted in the introduction of food rationing in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for the first time since World War II. Russia received humanitarian food aid from abroad. After the Belavezha Accords, the Supreme Soviet of Russia withdrew Russia from the Soviet Union on 12 December. The Soviet Union officially ended on 25 December 1991,[199] and the Russian Federation (formerly the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic)[200] took power on 26 December.[199] The Russian government lifted price control on January 1992. Prices rose dramatically, but shortages disappeared.

Although Yeltsin came to power on a wave of optimism, he never recovered his popularity after endorsing Yegor Gaidar's "shock therapy" of ending Soviet-era price controls, drastic cuts in state spending, and an open foreign trade regime in early 1992 (seeRussian economic reform in the 1990s). The reforms immediately devastated the living standards of much of the population. In the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn that was, in some ways, more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression.[201] Hyperinflation hit the ruble, due to monetary overhang from the days of the planned economy.

Meanwhile, the profusion of small parties and their aversion to coherent alliances left the legislature chaotic. During 1993, Yeltsin's rift with the parliamentary leadership led to the September–October 1993 constitutional crisis. The crisis climaxed on 3 October, when Yeltsin chose a radical solution to settle his dispute with parliament: he called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his opponents. As Yeltsin was taking the unconstitutional step of dissolving the legislature, Russia came close to a serious civil conflict. Yeltsin was then free to impose the current Russian constitution with strong presidential powers, which was approved by referendum in December 1993. The cohesion of the Russian Federation was also threatened when the republic of Chechnya attempted to break away, leading to the First and Second Chechen Wars.

Economic reforms also consolidated a semi-criminal oligarchy with roots in the old Soviet system. Advised by Western governments, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, Russia embarked on the largest and fastest privatization that the world had ever seen in order to reform the fully nationalized Soviet economy. By mid-decade, retail, trade, services, and small industry was in private hands. Most big enterprises were acquired by their old managers, engendering a new rich (Russian tycoons) in league with criminal mafias or Western investors.[202] That being said, there were corporate raiders such as Andrei Volgin engaged in hostile takeovers of corrupt corporations by the mid-1990s. By the mid-1990s Russia had a system of multiparty electoral politics.[203] But it was harder to establish a representative government because of two structural problems—the struggle between president and parliament and the anarchic party system.

Meanwhile, the central government had lost control of the localities, bureaucracy, and economic fiefdoms; tax revenues had collapsed. Still in deep depression by the mid-1990s, Russia's economy was hit further by the financial crash of 1998. After the 1998 financial crisis, Yeltsin was at the end of his political career. Just hours before the first day of 2000, Yeltsin made a surprise announcement of his resignation, leaving the government in the hands of the little-known Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official and head of the FSB, the KGB's post-Soviet successor agency.[204] In 2000, the new acting president defeated his opponents in the presidential election on 26 March, and won a landslide 4 years later.[205] International observers were alarmed by late 2004 moves to further tighten the presidency's control over parliament, civil society, and regional officeholders.[206] In 2008 Dmitri Medvedev, a former Gazprom chairman and Putin's head of staff, was elected new President of Russia. In 2012, Putin was once again elected as President.

Russia has had difficulty attracting foreign direct investment[citation needed] and has experienced large capital outflows in the past several years[citation needed]. Russia's long-term problems also include a shrinking workforce, rampant corruption, and underinvestment in infrastructure.[207] Nevertheless, reversion to a socialistcommand economy seemed almost impossible.[208] Russia ended 2006 with its eighth straight year of growth, averaging 6.7% annually since the financial crisis of 1998. Although high oil prices and a relatively cheap ruble initially drove this growth, since 2003 consumer demand and, more recently, investment have played a significant role.[207] Russia is well ahead of most other resource-rich countries in its economic development, with a long tradition of education, science, and industry.[209]

Scholars have examined the prevailing political philosophy in recent years under President Putin. Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn argue regarding the philosophy behind Putin's dealing with Ukraine in 2014:

True to Putin’s insistence that Russia cannot be judged in Western terms, Putin’s new conservatism does not fit U.S. and European definitions. In fact, the main trait they share is opposition to liberalism. Whereas conservatives in those parts of the world are fearful of big government and put the individual first, Russian conservatives advocate for state power and see individuals as serving that state. They draw on a long tradition of Russian imperial conservatism and, in particular, Eurasianism. That strain is authoritarian in essence, traditional, anti-American, and anti-European; it values religion and public submission. And more significant to today’s headlines, it is expansionist.[210]

^This is far higher than the original number of 7 million given by Stalin, and, indeed, the number has increased under various Soviet and Russian Federation leaders. See Mark Harrison, The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 291 (ISBN 0-521-78503-0), for more information.

^ ab"Leonid Brezhnev, 1906–1982". The History Guide. Retrieved 22 July 2007. During the 1970s Brezhnev attempted to normalize relations between West Germany and the Warsaw Pact and to ease tensions with the United States through the policy known as détente. At the same time, he saw to it that the Soviet Union's military-industrial complex was greatly expanded and modernized.", "After his death, he was criticized for a gradual slide in living standards, the spread of corruption and cronyism within the Soviet bureaucracy, and the generally stagnant and dispiriting character of Soviet life in the late 1970s and early '80s.

^Steve Garber (19 January 2007). "Sputnik and The Dawn of the Space Age". NASA. Retrieved 22 July 2007. History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world's first artificial satellite...

^Neil Perry (12 April 2001). "Yuri Gagarin". The Guardian (UK). Retrieved 22 July 2007. 12 April 2001 is the fortieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight into space, the first time a human left the planet

^David Pryce-Jones (20 March 2000). "Boris on a Pedestal". National Review Online. Retrieved 22 July 2007. In the process he engaged in a power struggle with Mikhail Gorbachev...

^"Boris Yeltsin". CNN. Archived from the original on 13 June 2008. Retrieved 22 July 2007. The first-ever popularly elected leader of Russia, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a protégé of Mikhail Gorbachev's.

^"Government". Country Studies. Retrieved 22 July 2007. Because of the Russians' dominance in the affairs of the union, the RSFSR failed to develop some of the institutions of governance and administration that were typical of public life in the other republics: a republic-level communist party, a Russian academy of sciences, and Russian branches of trade unions, for example.

^"Putin's hold on the Russians". BBC. 28 June 2007. Retrieved 22 July 2007. In the 2000 election, he took 53% of the vote in the first round and, four years later, was re-elected with a landslide majority of 71%.

^"Putin's hold on the Russians". BBC. 28 June 2007. Retrieved 22 July 2007. But his critics believe that it has come at the cost of some post-communist democratic freedoms.", "2003: General election gives Putin allies control over parliament"